GitHub finally launches its own mobile app (Part 1)

Today, Microsoft -owned GitHub at its annual Universe conference announced a couple of new products, and the general availability of a number of tools for the last few months which developers have been able to test.

An improved notifications experience and the launch of GitHub’s first native mobile app are the two announcements which developers will likely be most interested in. But in addition to that, the company’s CI/CD solution workflow automation GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages is also being taken out of beta. GitHub is also adding scheduled reminders, improving its code search, and launching a pre-release program which will allow users to try out before they are ready for a wider rollout new features.

Shanku Niyogi GitHub SVP of Product told that developers were what’s driving them and they were building the experiences and the tools to help them come together to do it on an open ecosystem and platform and to create the world’s most important technologies. He said today’s announcements were driven to improve the developer experience by the company’s mission. Niyogi stressed that the company launched well over 150 new enhancements and features over the course of the last year. Athough the company decided to highlight for its universe show the new notification enhancements and mobile app.

GitHub is also extending its sponsor program GitHub Sponsors, that until now allowed you to tip to the project level individual open-source contributors for their work. Anybody can help fund a project and then the members of that project get to choose how to use the money. These projects have to be open source and have a bank account as well as a nonprofit or corporate entity attached to it.

Of course others have built mobile apps before for GitHub and it turns out that the developer of GitHawk who recently joined GitHub to help the company to get this new app off the ground in its efforts launched it while he was an Instagram engineer.